Quick Links - Poets.org

follow poets.org

Search form

The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

In the Pure Block of the Whole Imaginary

Publisher

Year

Type

Find on

Richard Meier's third book presents the intimate and intricate networks of daily life in prose poems that blur sensory details with quotidian narratives. Christian Hawkey writes, "[each poem] is nearly as fragile and complex and impure as the networks and systems we live in, or beside." The poems themselves have no titles, are held together in sections which are labeled by the first lines of the poems they contain, and make use of a variation of the New Sentence—introduced by Language poets and most notably by Lyn Hejinian in her autobiographical work My Life. From "[Tried once to open the door and go out into the street, under a puffy sky]"

The mutability on which we'd meant to love conquered with a process dark and cold, fusing the division we had meant to choose. When was it she had dug into the rotten shell of the English walnut with a powerful thumb and turned them both green? A laundry basket struggled down the street in the arms of a man. The bark of an elm on bare skin was smooth from these distances. It wasn't enough anymore to say we felt diminished.

The details of the poems accumulate to create a moving and intricate portrait of the speaker and his surroundings. Further, the richness of the work speaks to, as Hawkey notes, "a reparative opulence that attends to acts of naming and unnaming as the first ethics of daily life."